This book uses the climatic year of 1492, a year laden with epic events and riven by political debate, to explore a clash of civilizations — between the Jews, Christendom, and Islam, as well as that between the New World and the Old. In the same year that Columbus set sail across the Atlantic, the book reminds us, the Spanish monarchy captured Granada, the last Muslim stronghold on the peninsula, and also expelled the Jews. It uses these three epochal events to explore the nature of the European-Islamic conflict, placing the voyages of discovery in a new context. It traces Christian Europe's p ... More

This book uses the climatic year of 1492, a year laden with epic events and riven by political debate, to explore a clash of civilizations — between the Jews, Christendom, and Islam, as well as that between the New World and the Old. In the same year that Columbus set sail across the Atlantic, the book reminds us, the Spanish monarchy captured Granada, the last Muslim stronghold on the peninsula, and also expelled the Jews. It uses these three epochal events to explore the nature of the European-Islamic conflict, placing the voyages of discovery in a new context. It traces Christian Europe's path from being a primitive backwater on the edges of the vast, cosmopolitan Caliphate, through the heightening rivalry of the two religions, to the triumph of the West over Islam, examining the factors behind their changing fortunes and cultural qualities. The book provides a new understanding of the distant events that gave shape to the modern world.